alt Hacker NewsNote that they're running R630/R730s for storage. Those are 12-year old servers, and yet they say each one can do 20 Gbps (2.5 GBps) of random reads. In comparison, the same generation of hardware at AWS ({c,m,r}4) instance maxes out at 50% of that for EBS throughput on m4, and 70% on r4 - and that assumes carefully tuned block sizes.
Old hardware is _plenty_ powerful for a lot of tasks today.
I’m on a project at work replacing our R430s and R730s. They’ve been absolute tanks with very few hardware failures. That said, my company chooses to have OEM support for replacing failed components and keeping firmware/bios/idrac updated. You can absolutely run these if you’re OK with 3rd party replacements or parting out spare machines. Some industries are more tolerant to this than others.